Clean chit to suspects in Delhi constable’s ‘murder’

The Delhi Police on Tuesday said it found no evidence against eight youths held in connection with the death of constable Subhash Tomar during the protests against the Delhi gangrape in December last year.

The police, however, claimed it had evidence of their involvement in destruction of public property and rioting.

“We have done the analysis.. we have electronic record in the form of phone location records. We have found evidence regarding their involvement in other offences, including damage of public property. But we found no evidence of their involvement in Tomar’s death,” Additional Solicitor General (ASG) Siddharth Luthra submitted before the Delhi High Court.

Luthra told justice Mittal that “the youths were never formally charged with murder but were named in the FIR for other charges in which the constable’s death was also being probed”.

The eight youths had moved the high court, challenging the charges against them. They claimed that they have been framed and had no role in the death of constable Tomar, who died of “cardiac arrest”.

A controversy was triggered by statements of two eyewitnesses, two contradictory conclusions by Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital and the post-mortem report on the cause of the death.

The eyewitnesses and RML hospital said there were no injuries on Tomar’s body and he had collapsed after suffering a heart attack. But the post-mortem report said he died due to cardiac arrest caused by injuries on his chest and neck “produced by blunt impact”.

Their lawyer Somnath Bharti said video footage showed that two of the accused, Kailash Joshi and his brother Amit, were travelling in a metro train at the time when Tomar had collapsed.